Hacker News Reader

Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

>This is sad but forseeable as Essential sold poorly. It was a nice phone but it can be hard to establish a new brand right now and differentiate oneself.

I don't think it is, everyone is just too afraid of doing something radically different. Essential phone was just another generic midrange Android phablet at a top end flagship price. Until someone completely throws that paradigm away we will be stuck with the bloated nonsense that smartphones have become. I would give ANYTHING for a 5" phone with capacitive touch e-ink display, 3000mAh battery, and a barebones BSD based OS that did nothing but call, text, take pictures, gps, and text-based web browsing.

View on HN

ANYTHING? Would you pay 20x the price of a bloated smartphone? In the developed world, that's what it'd cost due to the small market for such a device. Unfortunately, the price point for such a device further reduces the market ... essentially to zero.

not a rhetorical question. Does ANYTHING include 20x cost factor?

I wonder what they do in the developing world. Previous gen bloat-phones or simple flip phones, or something market-specific, closer to what you're asking for.

Why do you think people don't own smartphones in the developing world?

It's really a shame the Yota[1] phone never took off. I'd kill for a e-ink on the back, screen on the front phone with software that was built to take advantage of it.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/28/5450258/yotaphone-e-ink-d...

> I would give ANYTHING for a 5" phone with capacitive touch e-ink display, 3000mAh battery, and a barebones BSD based OS that did nothing but call, text, take pictures, gps, and text-based web browsing

Isn't that pretty much exactly what the light phone2 is? https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/light-phone-2-design#/

Not sure if it'll have browsing, but it's got everything else, including an e-ink display, which is probably the hardest feature to comeby in a phone

If you'd give around $300000 it can be done ;) Battery life could be an issue though. Also taking pictures with an e-ink screen won't be a very satisfying experience. Unfortunately I'm not convinced there's much more than a few hundred people worldwide who would pay good money for a "phone" that can't run any popular apps.

And each of those hundred people probably has _one_ additional app that they find essential, that no one else does. It's a brutal market.

Consider building your own. There's nothing stopping you.

I've heard whispers of mini PCIe 3G cards that have "unused" pins that actually offer up a USB device. That's how the USB-to-miniPCIe adapters work.

There are also ARM processors that can operate as USB hosts and run Linux or a BSD.

LiPo batteries are cheap and fun to use. The charging circuits are less fun, but there are probably ways to handle it without too much trouble.

And finally, our good friends at AliExpress or eBay have plenty of SPI-driven e-ink displays and probably a few usable digitizers, although you'll have to combine them yourself.

If you ever actually go through with building this, let me know. I looked into it once but lacked the time to ever finish.

Not quite what you're looking for, but at least somebody trying something different: https://www.unihertz.com/jelly.html

Glad to know others exist that just want a basic device that will last a week without charging without massive bloat and apps I don't care about.

You can get one for <$30, they're called featurephones. The rebooted Nokia 3310 claims one month of (stand by) battery life.

Aggh, sorry...I meant to be agreeing more with the parent comment I replied to. I want all that plus an e-ink screen running freeBSD and some very basic browsing. I don't think old Nokia dumb phones had that.

Just buy a dumb phone. It does exactly what you described.

Feature Phones are still a thing. You can still get such a thing.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/basic-phones/

There's a whole bunch of phones that do basically what you're looking for.

Yotaphone 2 for £103 https://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_346981.html?wid=1527...

The market for this is tiny, that's why it doesn't exist.

Agreed, I don't think anyone really wondered why it doesn't exist...kind of one of those expressions that don't translate well to message boards

Reply on news.ycombinator.com